At present, a subtherapeutic dose of antibiotics is used as a feed additive to be widely applied to a feed for livestock and poultry and plays an important role in promoting the growth of animals and preventing some diseases, however, people further know the side effects of the antibiotics along with the frequent occurrence of antibiotic misuse events. Antibiotic misuse not only can result in endogenous infection of the animals and generate drug-resistant strains, but also can lower the immunologic functions of livestock and poultry, and more seriously, the residual antibiotics in livestock and poultry products can flow into human bodies in different ways and generate harm to the human bodies.
EU regulatory commission decided that antibiotic growth promoters were forbidden in animal breeding since January 2006. Since December 2013, US FDA issued Veterinary Feed Directive in which licensed veterinarians were required to supervise the use of the antibiotics and preventive antibiotics were forbidden in feeds for livestock within three years since 2014 to reduce antibiotic drug resistance problems brought to consumers eating the livestock to the maximum extent. South Korea will also comprehensively forbid feed antibiotics in July 2018.
As the bacterial resistance to the antibiotics and the residue problems of the antibiotics become increasingly serious, the research and development of a green feed additive have become a worldwide research topic, and a large number of searches prove that a novel feed additive such as a Chinese herbal extract, a microbial preparation, an enzyme preparation, a prebiotic, an antimicrobial peptide and an acidifying agent can effectively reduce or substitute the feed antibiotics, wherein the antimicrobial peptide has the advantages of relatively good antimicrobial and immunoregulatory activity, no residues, no side effects, no drug resistance and no bad influences on the environment so as to become a potential effective substitute of the antibiotics.